Wilshire Grand Hotel to be Highest Tower in California & Has 400,000 feet of Office Space

This tower is in the perfect spot - the block of Figueroa between 7th & Wilshire - for a major hotel and the first new high rise office building in downtown in decades. It is by the new streetcar, the new subway connector and has direct access to four other subway lines. 

As for it's design, its simple, tapering shape is a good contrast with the forest of boxy high rises that surround it. That simplicity might also work better - as part of the overall urban fabric - than a showier tower.  Here is part of the coverage over at LACURBED where you can find the rest of the story.

The Wilshire Grand is comin' for you, US Bank Tower--today developer Korean Air is unveiling its final plans for the *73-story tower (which is already under construction; demolition on the old Wilshire Grand began last fall) and turns out it'll be 1,100 feet tall including its spire; the US Bank is a puny 1,018 feet. That will make Wilshire Grand the tallest building on the West Coast. Our world is tilting off its axis just a little today. Furthermore, it'll be LA's first tower since 1974 built without a flat top. AC Martin Partners designed the building, which "will be capped by an iconic sail-shaped architectural feature that will be illuminated with LED lighting at night," according to blogger Brigham Yen. (This lighting was the source of an enormous amount of contention during the project's approval process; supposedly it can't possibly be used for advertising.) The development started life as an office/hotel project two towers--one 45 stories and the other 65--but was rejiggered last year into a single tower with 900 hotel rooms, 400,000 square feet of office space, groundfloor retail, and a top-floor "sky lobby" reached by "one of the fastest dual high-speed elevators in the world."